The year Flash lost the mobile war: a look back at 2011’s top IT stories

From Flash losing the mobile war to the failures of HP and RIM, it was an …

2011 was a year of upheaval in IT, with Flash losing the mobile war to HTML5, RSA succumbing to a hack leaving SecurID products exposed, HP and RIM making big mistakes in core markets, cloud services taking off (while suffering some outages), and more rapid browser release cycles making life difficult for the enterprise. Here's a recap of the year's top stories in IT.

Flash loses mobile war to HTML5

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote his "Thoughts on Flash" open letter in April 2010, it was not yet clear that Adobe Flash would lose the war for mobile video. But with Apple's refusal to support Flash on the iPad and iPhone, consistent performance issues on mobile devices, and an increasingly industry-wide move toward HTML5, Adobe gave up in November of this year and gutted its mobile Flash player strategy. Layoffs were paired with a halt to development of Flash Player for mobile browsers, with mobile Flash support limited to critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. HTML5 will face trials and tribulations in the post-Flash era, but with Adobe admitting the game is up and throwing its support behind HTML5, the world now seems to be moving in one direction.

RSA gets hacked, eventually admits SecurID is compromised

Security firm RSA was victimized by an attack that exposed information related to the company's SecurID two-factor authentication products, which require users to enter a secret code number displayed on a keyfob, or in software, in addition to their password. When announcing the breach in March, RSA said the information lost would not allow any direct attack on SecurID, but three months later admitted that SecurID had failed to protect defense contractor Lockheed Martin from an attack enabled by the creation of duplicate SecurID tokens. RSA offered to replace nearly all the 40 million SecurID tokens in use by customers.

RIM trips self up with outage, product delays

With Research In Motion struggling to maintain relevance in the face of the iPhone, iPad and Android, the company fell flat on its face with a worldwide system outage that affected e-mail, messaging and browsing for parts of four days from October 10-13. RIM struggled to identify the cause of its outage, attributed vaguely to a failure in a core switch and backup system, but its problems did not end when the systems came back online. Delays in building a next-generation operating system for phones and tablets have failed to help RIM halt its decline in marketshare, and the PlayBook tablet's failure in the market cost the company $485 million in the third quarter.

HP gives up on webOS, contemplates giving up on PC business

Like RIM, HP is one of the most important companies in the IT industry, and one that spent much of 2011 in freefall. After the HP TouchPad sold poorly, the company said on August 18 that it would cease all operations related to webOS phones and tablets. And with disappointing PC profit margins, HP also publicly talked about exiting the PC business entirely. Things changed in September when HP replaced CEO Leo Apotheker with former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who decided in October that HP would keep its PC division, and in December that HP would turn webOS into an open source project. While that clarifies HP's future plans, it's not clear how the company will boost its flagging PC business or gain entry into the tablet market dominated by Apple.

Cloud outages remind us of the cloud's weaknesses

As the most successful infrastructure-as-a-service cloud platform, Amazon EC2 has come to be relied upon by many businesses both large and small, who expect near 100 percent uptime or, at least, only occasional, short delays. But on April 21 Amazon's Elastic Block Store, which provides storage to EC2 virtual machines, went offline and wouldn't be fully restored until three days later. Reddit, Foursquare, Quora and others were among the sites that went down as a result. Amazon's outage wasn't the only troubling event for cloud customers this year, as Microsoft's Office 365 and Google Docs both suffered outages in September. While no data center can remain online 100 percent of the time, the unexpected outages in major cloud services may give pause to those considering a shift from on-premises systems.

Office 365 ships, intensifying cloud war vs. Google

With Microsoft facing a challenge to its core Office software from Google Apps, Redmond in June launched Office 365, an upgraded version of its cloud services combining Exchange e-mail, Lync messaging, SharePoint collaboration, and Office Web Apps into one monthly subscription. While an upgrade over Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite, Office 365 has still suffered some downtime and complaints about messaging caps and customer support. But with prices ranging from $4 to $27 per user per month, the suite gives Microsoft a more viable answer to the threat posed by Google Apps, which continues to pick up new customers despite the failure to satisfy security requirements of the LAPD, one of its highest-profile customers.

Browser wars, rapid release cycles hit the enterprise

For many years, Internet Explorer 6 was the standard corporate Web browser—applications built for IE6 simply didn't work on rival platforms or newer versions of Microsoft's browser. But with a more competitive browser market consisting mainly of IE, Chrome and Firefox, browser makers are trying to outdo each other with faster and faster releases taking advantage of new Web capabilities. Google argues that older browsers "just don’t have the chops to provide the same high-quality experience that a modern browser can," but the quicker pace of innovation in browsers and Web services can make life difficult for IT shops. The pace only grew quicker in 2011, with Mozilla adopting adopting a more rapid release cycle for Firefox, Microsoft releasing Internet Explorer 9, and introducing an automatic update plan that could finally spell the end of IE6.